thoughts about my works

My artworks are characterized basically as realistic. However, I like to refute realism using flat surfaces with certain patterns. It seems that these patterns annul and at the same time support one another. The theme in my artworks plays the foremost and last role in them. I focus my strengths on the narrative and most specifically on the subject narrated. This does not mean that I neglect my designing and my form moulding. I like to talk through images. Images that tell stories; images that scare; images that shock; puzzling images; thought-provoking images. Sometimes they have to do with the children’s soul; sometimes with the wear that time brings in the old age and other times with oppression and entrapment in the workplace.

In my first solo exhibition, I reversed reality via a special pop-realistic style, extreme and contradictory incidents everyday life of the elderly. Among my themes: an elderly woman who plays with her dolls; another one with “a walker” dragging a urinary catheter behind her and another one with a younger woman drinking pills from a huge feeding bottle. In perhaps the most typical work of my collection: my over aged grandmother is depicted in front of the Houses of the Greek Parliament as a skater; in that way it seems as if she is returning to a time of innocence and insouciance beyond the standard limits and conventions attached with the wear and the agony of death. In an amusing and sensitive reversal, the decrepit woman is playing lively, mocking, in this way, old age and death.

In a similar reversal, girls – heroines of fairy tales overturn conventional roles: they stare decisively through their tale; they are children, but they look more like adults and seem to know more than us. Juggling between the innocence of the fairy tale and the threat of reality, they call us to unravel their destiny and solve their own puzzle. Although they constitute figures which are dreamy, transcendental, unreal with icy cold colours highlighting their absence, deep inside they are little girls who embody our innocent defenseless self, which is at risk of exploitation, abuse, natural disaster.

In my purely autobiographical exhibition “A position in civil service”, I express taunt with bitter and almost surreal humour, casting off in this way what scares me, the entrapment by the system and the endless bureaucracy which eliminates, cancels everyone’s personality trampling their ego, transforming them into a machine of null. And in the end it shapes-transforms them into a spineless creature sucking any trace of life from them. Prisoners of their own office, as if they were an integral part of it, public servants either at their young age dream of certain dreams, or at an older age dream of dreams which are stolen by something bigger and stronger they cannot fight; sometimes they break down on the document they draft and sign and other times with a cage on their heads trapping their brain and dissolving their thoughts with their hands tied up, they seem to have accepted their fate.

The faces found in the crates are colleagues, friends, students and relatives of mine. This intimacy of mine is essential. This indirect or direct self biography and the recording of familiar objects and persons are the cocoon of my creativity.

Finally, my favorite rabbit that appears in many of my paintings, sometimes leading and other times playing secondary role, functions as incantation-exorcising evil, guilt and loneliness, expressing in this way the childlike innocence hidden inside me.